Older blog entries for mikal (starting at number 880)

More on Robyn

I apologize if there are factual inaccuracies in this post. It has been written with the best information I have available at the time.


I have just got off the phone with Robyn's kids at RPA. My understanding is that if Robyn's health doesn't improve they can no longer do a transplant. If she doesn't improve within a couple of days the doctors want to start talking about turning off life support.

Tags for this post: health robyn liver sydney
Related posts: A further update on Robyn's health; Robyn's Health; In Sydney!; In Sydney for the day; Planes at 600 meters!; Sydney next week; Getting ready to leave Sydney; What are we doing with the pets?; Slack talk at SLUG; Don't use Jetbus Sydney if you want to catch your flight; Travel details so far; In Sydney; Sydney 1, Mikal 1; Sydney redeems itself, if only a little; Google? Sydney?; On the potentially sorry state of second hand science fiction book stores in Sydney

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Syndicated 2012-03-18 19:44:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Rage of a Demon King




ISBN: 0006482988
HarperVoyager (1998), Paperback, 656 pages
LibraryThing
I've been reading this book for ages, but finished it last night. It feels a bit trivial to be writing this now, but I tend to read more when I am stressed, and I finished this while waiting for the kids to go to bed last night, so I may as well quickly write it up.

This book is the Kingdom war promised in Shadow of a Dark Queen and Rise of a Merchant Prince. I was a lot more comfortable with this book, because its mostly not about Roo wanting to shag every woman on the planet. In fact, a lot of people get their comeuppance, which is nice. However, heaps of people who don't deserve it also die. Its almost like a A Hymn Before Battle or Legion of the Damned, which are both books which stick in my mind as being ones where most everyone dies. Overall a good book, which a good ending which I think is a little rare for large scale combat novels.

Tags for this post: book raymond_e_feist midkemia combat crime fantasy sword_and_sorcery serpent_war
Related posts: Shadow of a Dark Queen; Rise of a Merchant Prince; Daughter of the Empire; The King's Buccaneer; Servant of the Empire; The Riftwar Series; Silverthorn; A Darkness at Sethanon; Mistress of the Empire; Prince of the Blood; Magician: Master; Magician: Apprentice; Raymond E Feist's Empire Trilogy; Polar City Blues; Dawnspell: The Bristling Wood; Caves of Steel; Currency; Tipping point: windscreen washers; You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat; Belgarath the Sorcerer; The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat


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Syndicated 2012-03-18 15:58:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

A further update on Robyn's health

I apologize if there are factual inaccuracies in this post. It has been written with the best information I have available at the time.


Here's a status update on what I know about Robyn's condition. She has been in the ICU at RPA in Sydney since about noon yesterday. All of her children made it up to see her, although she has been heavily sedated in the ICU and cannot respond to conversation with the kids. As part of the ICU process they have surgically implanted a series of devices, including dialysis, breathing assistance, and a feeding tube. My understanding is that the sedation is mostly about reducing panic about these devices.

As best as I am aware the transplant meeting is still going ahead today. The doctors yesterday were saying that the battle isn't over, so that was at least slightly reassuring. Apparently it isn't unexpected for someone awaiting a liver transplant to have sudden flare ups.

I have been getting a lot of requests for information, which is nice in that its obvious that lots of people care deeply about Robyn. Its amazing how many people she has touched in her life. I have therefore created a mailing list I will send these updates to for those who don't want to check here regularly. You can find details for the list here.

Tags for this post: health robyn liver sydney
Related posts: Robyn's Health; In Sydney!; In Sydney for the day; Planes at 600 meters!; Sydney next week; Getting ready to leave Sydney; What are we doing with the pets?; Slack talk at SLUG; Don't use Jetbus Sydney if you want to catch your flight; Travel details so far; In Sydney; Sydney 1, Mikal 1; Sydney redeems itself, if only a little; Google? Sydney?; On the potentially sorry state of second hand science fiction book stores in Sydney

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Syndicated 2012-03-18 13:39:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Robyn's Health

I apologize if there are factual inaccuracies in this post. It has been written with the best information I have available at the time.


My mother in law, Robyn Boland, has had severe liver problems for a long time, and has been in and out of hospital in Canberra for at least a year. This was one of the major factors in being unable to move to Sydney for Google, and was one of the reasons I was ultimately laid off by them. However, Robyn's condition has been getting worse recently and she was transfered to Sydney about two weeks ago. The transfer was because RPA is the regional specialist hospital in liver problems.

On Friday I got a call from the resident overseeing Robyn's care. I was told that her liver had basically failed, and that it only had months of any form of operation remaining at best. The liver failure has resulted in the kidney's having to do more work than normal, and they are now failing under the additional workload. The doctors wanted to put Robyn on the transplant waiting list, which we of course agreed to.

However, this morning we got a call that Robyn is now much worse, and has been moved into intensive care after requiring a crash cart to resuscitate. Emily and Justin were already at the hospital, but the other kids are now flying to Sydney as rapidly as they can to be there. I am staying home for now to look after the kids. We obviously don't know what the likely outcome is at this stage, but things are looking pretty grim to be honest.

So, I'm pretty distracted at the moment. If you've emailed me about conference stuff or anything else, I apologize and will work through the mail backlog as soon as I can.

Tags for this post: health robyn liver sydney
Related posts: In Sydney!; In Sydney for the day; Planes at 600 meters!; Sydney next week; Getting ready to leave Sydney; What are we doing with the pets?; Slack talk at SLUG; Don't use Jetbus Sydney if you want to catch your flight; Travel details so far; In Sydney; Sydney 1, Mikal 1; Sydney redeems itself, if only a little; Google? Sydney?; On the potentially sorry state of second hand science fiction book stores in Sydney

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Syndicated 2012-03-17 16:24:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

It seems stickers are a gas

It seems that stickers are a gas -- they expand to occupy available space. We thought we'd ordered heaps of extra stickers to promote LCA 2013, but now we find ourselves running low. That's not a huge problem, but I do wonder if they are getting used or are just in the bottom of people's sock drawers. So here's the plan -- if you've got a LCA 2013 sticker and have stuck it somewhere, why not tweet a picture of it with the #lca2013 hashtag? If you don't use twitter, blog it or whatever and let us know at contact@lca2013.linux.org.au. The best picture will get a prize. I don't know what yet, because I just totally made this up. Perhaps a t-shirt. Perhaps a pet goat.



Tags for this post: conference lca2013 stickers

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Syndicated 2012-03-15 16:42:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Runner




ISBN: 9780441014095
LibraryThing
I bought this book on impulse, and I am glad I did. The book is very Buddhist in its outlook, and characters believe in reincarnation, which makes it ok for people to die. There sure is a lot of that happening in this book, perhaps more so than in Dietz's combat books. The underlying story is very different from the other Dietz stuff I have read, and very good. The Legion of the Damned books suffer from very one dimensional characterizations of their female characters, whereas this book has a strong female as a leading and fully developed character, which is a nice change. I enjoyed this book.

Tags for this post: book william_c_dietz religion combat space_travel decay courier engineered_human genetic_engineering
Related posts: The Accidental Time Machine ; Rendezvous With Rama; Friday ; Cyteen: The Vindication; Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow ; East of the Sun, West of the Moon; The White Dragon; The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress; The Last Colony ; Zoe's Tale; The Ship Who Sang ; Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom; Cyteen: The Betrayal; Starbound; Patron saints; Buying Time; Marsbound; Red Mars; Emerald Sea; Snow Crash ; Nerilka's Story


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Syndicated 2012-02-26 01:21:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Red Storm Rising




ISBN: 0006173624
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd (1988), Paperback, 832 pages
LibraryThing
I had read this book many years ago, and remembered it fondly. I wasn't disappointed reading it again -- its certainly a classic techno-thriller, even if it is a little dated now. I imagine it would make less sense to someone who hadn't grown up with the cold war, but within that context its a good read. The worst bit is that given what we knew back then it is so completely plausible. Great book.

Tags for this post: book tom_clancy combat communism thriller
Related posts: The Road to Damascus


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Syndicated 2012-02-10 18:13:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

The next thing

It has been a couple of months, so I feel that perhaps its time that I mentioned more publicly where I ended up after Google. I am now a systems administrator at Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu. That's a pretty good fit for me in the sense that I have been a Ubuntu user for a very long time. For reference, I don't love the job title "systems administrator" because it doesn't really match what I do, but it isn't something I'm fixated on.

One of the things I help manage at Canonical is our Openstack infrastructure. Along the way I've been finding a few things there I think can be improved, which is why I've been hacking on Openstack in my spare time. I've had a couple of patches merged already, and am generally having fun contributing to an open source project which I think stands a very good chance of being the Apache of cloud management. It is a lot like the stuff I was doing at Google in the sense that I like working on things which I think will affect the quality of life for a large number of people, and Openstack is clearly in that space.

Canonical is also much more open about contributing to open source projects than Google was, so expect me to be able to talk more about what I do in my work life than I did before. I think its already noticeable that I am blogging more than I did during my six years at the big G.

Tags for this post: work canonical google
Related posts: Taking over a launch pad project; Slow git review uploads?; Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; Wow, qemu-img is fast; Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?; Announcement video; linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013; Openstack compute node cleanup

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Syndicated 2012-02-04 15:50:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Rise of a Merchant Prince




ISBN: 0006497012
CollinsVoyager (1996), Paperback, 496 pages
LibraryThing
I didn't really like this book, but I persisted with it because I want to keep reading the series. I thought the previous Serpent War book Shadow of a Dark Queen was weak, but this book was weaker. The book follows the rise of Roo as a merchant, and is improbable at best -- Roo's wealth is generated by cornering the food market for Krondor and I see weaknesses in the analysis there -- surely the Duke wouldn't allow such a manipulation of the market when it harms his citizens, why weren't there food riots when the cost of basic staples jumped to record levels overnight? Basically, it just doesn't seem believable to me.

The sequence at the panthian lair on the other hand is much better, and the best bit of the book. Its a pity it is only about 50 pages long.

Tags for this post: book raymond_e_feist midkemia combat crime fantasy sword_and_sorcery serpent_war
Related posts: Shadow of a Dark Queen; Daughter of the Empire; The King's Buccaneer; Servant of the Empire; The Riftwar Series; Silverthorn; A Darkness at Sethanon; Mistress of the Empire; Prince of the Blood; Magician: Master; Magician: Apprentice; Raymond E Feist's Empire Trilogy; Polar City Blues; Dawnspell: The Bristling Wood; Caves of Steel; Currency; Tipping point: windscreen washers; You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat; Belgarath the Sorcerer; The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat; Mona Lisa Overdrive


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Syndicated 2012-02-04 15:30:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

An update on Catherine's health

In the last week we've now seen the two specialists that we needed to see to learn more about Catherine's pituitary adenoma. The first was the opthamologist, who kindly saw us at very short notice. Even better, he's Andrew Tridgell's brother and a lovely guy. He did a great job of answering our questions and generally reassuring us, and the short of it is that Catherine's vision is not current disturbed and barring another hemorrhage or a significant growth in the tumor it shouldn't be. He of course couldn't rule these things out, but that's because all things are possible even if they are unlikely. The ongoing strategy here appears to be a series of MRIs and visual field studies done every six months or so for the foreseeable future. The only real wart here was that if there is a hemorrhage, which is something we can't control, the prognosis here could change rapidly for the worse with very little warning. There is evidence of a previous hemorrhage on the MRI.

The second specialist was the endocronologist, who we saw on Monday in Sydney. Again he was a lovely guy and put up with our two pages of questions. As best as he can tell the adenoma is not cancer, but he's not sure if it is functional or not (controlling the level of prolactin in Catherine's body). The first steps are that he's going to take the MRI films to a radiologist specializing in cranial scans, and has put Catherine on a drug which should control her prolactin levels. Then it will be a blood test in a month to see if the drug is working, and we'll take it from there. He was talking about the possibility that this whole thing is related to Catherine's sarcoidosis from a decade ago, but he thinks that only a biopsy of the tumor will confirm that. I feel that if they're going to do brain surgery for a biopsy they may as well just take the darn thing out while they're there, but we'll have that argument when we get there.

So, overall not as horribly bad as it could have been. There are still risks if there is a hemorrhage, and its possible that we'll end up seeing a neurosurgeon to have the tumor removed, but we'll cross those bridges when we come to them. The next step is either that the radiologist will see something on the MRI that he thinks needs more information, or that Catherine will have a blood test in a month. We'll keep you posted.

Tags for this post: health catherine brain tumor pituitary adenoma
Related posts: It hasn't been a very good week; JJJ's hack

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Syndicated 2012-02-04 02:02:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

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